The Diplomacy of Regime Change: W.A. P. Martin's Accounts of the Taiping Rebellion During the Opium Wars

Abstract

In 1856 when urging diplomatic recognition of the Taiping by the United States, the American Presbyterian missionary W.A.P. Martin laid out a world historical showdown between abstemious Christian revolutionaries of a rising China and besotted pagan and tyrannical Tartars, fallen into degenerative bankruptcy from the vice of opium smoking. In four letters to the US Attorney General Caleb Cushing—letters composed in Ningbo and published in the North China Herald—Martin brought home his point by likening the Taiping to Puritan colonists settling the savage wilderness of North America in a Glorious Protestant revolution that reached a crescendo with the Declaration of Independence. Cushing might have enjoyed Martin’s grand orchestration of world historical allegorical thinking. In 1844 he too had heralded the advance of Christendom when negotiating the Treaty of Wangxia, which he later reinterpreted (inaccurately) as Attorney General, claiming it was the Qing empire’s concession of absolute and unqualified extraterritoriality to the US, whose citizens Cushing deemed categorically beyond pagan law. In analogizing the Taiping to Puritan colonists, Martin also evoked an imperial legacy of Christendom related to the diplomatic premise of Indian Removal about which Cushing wrote extensively in the 1820s and 1830s when asserting that Native peoples of North America were not sovereign nations. The contemporaneous diplomacy of Indian Removal entailed flooding marketplaces and treaty sites with rum, against the pleas of Native leaders, and coercing transactions of territorial dispossession, predicated on blend of debt obligation and categorical disenfranchisement. In both contexts, Christendom condemned pagans for being enthralled to a hedonistic vice (rum or opium) but Christians also used the vice as a financial instrument to control the diplomatic ground of commercial transaction. Although Martin grew deeply disillusioned with the Taiping, he leveraged subsequent diplomatic authority from his published celebrations of Taiping revolution. His pride in Christendom endured as an interpreter and translator for the treaties that ended the Second Opium War. His subsequent influential translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law continued to premise diplomatic respect of territorial sovereignty on Christendom in ways that have vexed his legacy but evince the imperial dynamics of nineteenth-century US diplomacy.